Google launches 'GigaPan Time Machine'

You've might have heard of the GigaPan robotic devices that capture high-res images to create digital mosaics composed of hundreds or thousands of pictures. But how about a GigaPan Time Machine?

Researchers at Camegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute have created a system that lets viewers explore high-resolution, gigapixel-scale videos and images by zooming in and out of the image sequences, while simultaneously moving back and forth through time.

Viewers, for instance, can use the system to focus in on the details of a booth within a panorama of a carnival midway, but also reverse time to see how the booth was constructed. Or they can watch a group of plants sprout, grow and flower, shifting perspective to watch some plants move wildly as they grow while others get eaten by caterpillars. Or, they can view a computer simulation of the early universe, watching as gravity works across 600 million light-years to condense matter into filaments and finally into stars that can be seen by zooming in for a close up.

"With GigaPan Time Machine, you can simultaneously explore space and time at extremely high resolutions," said Illah Nourbakhsh, associate professor of robotics and head of the CREATE Lab.

"Science has always been about narrowing your point of view - selecting a particular experiment or observation that you think might provide insight. But this system enables what we call exhaustive science, capturing huge amounts of data that can then be explored in amazing ways," added Nourbakhsh.

An enabling technology for time-lapse GigaPans is a feature of the HTML5 language that has been incorporated into such browsers as Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari. HTML5, the latest revision of the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) standard that is at the core of the Internet, makes browsers capable of presenting video content without use of plug-ins such as Adobe Flash or Quicktime.

Once a Time Machine GigaPan has been created, viewers can annotate and save their explorations of it in the form of video "Time Warps."

"With GigaPan Time Machine, you can simultaneously explore space and time at extremely high resolutions," associate professor of robotics and head of the Create Lab, Illah Nourbakhsh said in a press release. "Science has always been about narrowing your point of view -- selecting a particular experiment or observation that you think might provide insight. But this system enables what we call exhaustive science, capturing huge amounts of data that can then be explored in amazing ways."

The new system is an extension of the GigaPan technology, developed by Create Lab and NASA. To bring GigaPan into the time dimension, image mosaics are captured repeatedly at timed, set intervals. Think time lapse. On this one contains frames composed of hundreds of millions, or even billions of pixels.

Researchers have used the system to capture videos of carnival midways being built, flowers growing and caterpillars eating leaves. As well, a computer simulation shows how the early universe evolved across 600 million light-years.

Guidelines on how to capture time-lapse images using GigaPan cameras are included on the site created for hosting the new imagery’s large data files. And to view, you need Safari 5.0 or higher or Chrome 7.0 or higher.